Thursday, May 25, 2017

For most of us, Memorial Day is the unofficial start
of summer, a long weekend of cookouts, beach trips and sales. It didn’t start
out this way.

On Decoration Day, as the holiday was first called, sorrow
was still achingly fresh. We were a country of 31 million people in 1860 -- 22
million in the North and 9 million in the South, including 4 million slaves.
Estimates of the lives lost in the Civil War range from 620,000 to 850,000.

In the wake of the devastation, women in the South and
in the North flocked to local cemeteries to decorate soldiers’ graves with spring
flowers. Commerce ceased on Decoration Day as people took time to think and grieve.
And yet the hard nub of bitterness persisted.

Arlington National Cemetery was founded in 1864 to
bury Union dead on 200 acres at Robert E. Lee’s plantation on a hill
overlooking Washington D.C. Although

Confederate soldiers were also buried
there, family members of the Confederates were not allowed to decorate their
loved ones’ graves and sometimes even were denied entrance, according to the
cemetery’s website.

Then, in 1901 in an attempt at reconciliation,
hundreds more Confederate soldiers were reburied in a special section of the
cemetery. Their headstones had an unusual pointed
top to distinguish them from the rounded Union headstones. Southerners said the
point would “keep Yankees from sitting on them.”

A Confederate Monument was authorized, paid for by the
United Daughters of the Confederacy and built by a prominent sculptor and
Confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel.

President Woodrow Wilson, first Southern president elected
since the war, spoke at the dedication ceremony on June 4, 1914, a day after the
106th anniversary of the birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of
the Confederacy.

“My privilege is this, ladies and gentlemen: To
declare this chapter in the history of the United States closed and ended, and
I bid you turn with me with your faces to the future, quickened by the memories
of the past, but with nothing to do with the contests of the past, knowing, as
we have shed our blood upon opposite sides, we now face and admire one
another,” Wilson said.

The Virginia-born president’s words were more an
aspiration than an accurate account.

The ornate monument extols a romanticized version of
the Old South with 32 life-size figures, urns, shields, Biblical symbols and a
Latin inscription – “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni.”

The phrase from the poet Lucan translates as “The
victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the losing side (or cause)
pleases Cato,” roughly equating Lincoln with the tyrant Julius Caesar and the Confederacy
with Cato who fought Caesar valiantly but lost.

Americans are still struggling with how to remember
the Civil War. New Orleans has taken the lead by removing four Confederate
monuments. First to go was the most appalling – an obelisk to the Battle of
Liberty Place, honoring a white supremacist group that killed members of the city’s
integrated police force and state militia in 1874.

Three other monuments -- honoring Confederate Generals
Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis – were also removed
until suitable locations can be found.

“There is a difference between the remembrance of
history and reverence of it,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said.

That distinction – that we can and should remember the
past without idolizing it – is important as we try again as a country to move
forward.

One way may be to shift our focus from the famous figures
on pedestals to the forgotten fallen, those whose names are inscribed on
crumbling monuments on courthouse greens across the country.

On Memorial Day – a federal holiday since 1971 and the
Vietnam War -- we honor all Americans who died in military service. Just as in the
Vietnam era, during the Civil War a draft swept many into service. In the
1860s, those who could afford it could hire a substitute.

This isn’t to say we overlook, or give a pass to, the
Cult of the Lost Cause, the concerted attempt after the Civil War “to rewrite
history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side
of humanity,” as Landrieu said. Not at all.

Communities need to decide which statues should be
moved and where they should go. But cemeteries are a proper place for grandiose
monuments to dead people and dead ideas.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

In a time of nonstop surprises in Washington, we’re
about to experience a reassuringly familiar ritual.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration will deliver to
Congress the president’s proposed budget for fiscal 2018 – and it will land with
a thud.

“Dead on arrival,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said
in March.

Graham was reacting to Trump’s preliminary, so-called
“skinny budget,” with massive hikes in defense and deep cuts in foreign aid and
the State Department, along with other domestic programs.

Declaring the president’s budget dead is part of the familiar
scenario on Capitol Hill.

“We generally – no matter who the president is – we
don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the president’s budget,” Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Bloomberg News Tuesday.

The president’s budget does serve a purpose. As a blueprint
of where he wants to bulk up or starve programs, it’s worth more than a
thousand impulsive tweets about his values.

As a political document, it lets him say he has delivered
on campaign promises – and blame Congress if his proposals go nowhere.

Trump’s first four months in the White House have been
a brag, bumble and blame festival. His “America first” campaign has devolved
into a “Trump first” presidency that has left in its wake disappointment, if
not yet disillusionment, among long-suffering supporters.

“They are in a downward spiral right now,” Sen. Bob
Corker, R-Tenn., said of the White House.

In Trump’s self-centered world, though, he’s always
the victim.

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately,” he told
the graduating class at the Coast Guard Academy Wednesday, “especially by the
media. No politician in history – and I say this with great surety – has been
treated worse or more unfairly.”

Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon want to
“deconstruct” Washington. To that end, the budget reportedly will call for $800
billion in entitlement cuts over 10 years, including to Medicaid, envision
fantastic economic growth of 3 percent a year, and result in a balanced budget
in 10 years.

But it’s a starting point, not a road map.

“We share some of his priorities,” McConnell said. He
and other Republicans favor spending more on defense, but they insist tax cuts
must be paid for.

Tax cuts “will have to be revenue-neutral,” McConnell
said.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan proposed higher defense
spending, tax cuts and reductions in dozens of domestic programs aimed at shrinking
the size of the federal government. Congress went along with about 60 percent
of the proposed spending cuts, but the national debt still soared.

There already is push back on Trump’s proposals to cut the
State Department, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of
Health, public education, the arts, and safety net programs.

For example, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairman of the Appropriations
subcommittee in charge of NIH funding, said at a hearing Wednesday he was “very
proud” Congress approved a $2 billion increase, to $34.1 billion, in NIH
funding in 2017. Trump had sought a $1 billion cut.

Cole and other lawmakers plan to fight Trump’s
proposed $5.8 billion cut in NIH funding for fiscal 2018 as well.

With crises du
jour from the White House dominating the news and Congress, Trump’s agenda seems
to be slipping away.

His much-promised tax cut is somewhere over the
rainbow, along with the $1 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s crumbling
infrastructure. A GOP plan to repeal and replace Obamacare finally passed the
House, but the Senate is proceeding slowly.

McConnell pointedly said he’d like less drama from the
White House, although that seems unlikely, given the personality of the man in
the Oval Office.

Still, the Justice
Department’s appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller III as special
counsel overseeing the investigation into the Russian involvement in the
election may tamp down the chaos.

In another ritual of Washington, Republican leaders
will be working against the clock to wrap up budget negotiations and avoid a
government shutdown when the fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

That’s a heavy lift, especially with the government
running up against the debt ceiling this fall as well.

So watch for Republicans to ignore most of Trump’s
budget proposals. He’ll win a few victories – and blame others for his defeats.